October 30, 2006

[WoW] Taint

According to Blizzard, I should have my characters back to 99% by Friday. Both of my systems were clean of spyware/keyloggers/etc., but I've nuked both of them anyway.

These characters were characters I had built up over the span of thirteen months, and in the span of eight hours, half of them were deleted, and the others were stripped of nearly all their worldly possessions. All of my characters would have been deleted had I not reset my password at the moment I did... One of my characters had been ushered into Un'Goro Crater to farm and had her toolbars completely remapped. When I logged in, she was next to a fresh, unlooted kill.

While I'm glad that I'm going to be getting my characters back, the difficult thing is that I'm not sure if I'm going to want to use my restored characters. They've been tainted by this experience. I'm afraid to check the skill tree for my main for fear that she'll have gone through an involuntary respec. The hacker had already trained on some skills I had intentionally been leaving alone because they didn't fit the way that I played that class.

So this weekend, I started a new character and over the course of six hours, powerlevelled him to level 12. Sure, it's a long way from where Nekomenchi was (level 53), but there is no hacker taint on this character...and I hope to keep it that way.

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About Me

Currently Sr. Software Engineer in Test at Netflix. Formerly Sr. Quality Engineer on Firefly at Amazon, QA Manager at Ritual Entertainment, Software Test Lead at Microsoft Game Studios, Director of IT for Meeting Professionals International.

Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent those of any current, former, or future employer.